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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
Too Busy To Do What We Know Is Right!
The sales team knew the sales process helped improve the results they produced–they had tested it, they’d seen profound improvements in result, but they weren’t using it. They struggled to produce results. The manager knew he was supposed to coach his people. He knew that coaching was the most effective way to improve performance and drive results. But instead, he jumped in to “save deals,” and dictated next steps to the sales people. His team’s performance wasn’t consistent, consequently always in crisis. The manager knew that he was undisciplined in managing his time. He knew he needed to prioritize and […]
Driving Better Sales Performance Through Sales Management
Every survey we see continued declines in sales performance–across all industries and across every dimension. In response to these declines, organizations invest millions in technology oriented to helping improve the efficiency of sales people. They invest millions in training, hoping to provide the skills to help sales people. They invest millions in content and other programs, hoping to provide that stuff which, somehow, is supposed to help sales people perform. All those are important investments, but, again, they don’t seem to be moving the needle. Yet we tend to pour millions into providing more and more of these things. Ironically, […]
Key To Great Customer Experience
We know the importance of customer experience. Whether it’s their buying experience or their experience in implementing or using our solutions, customer experience is key to our success. It’s what causes them to buy, repurchase, and recommend. Billions are being invested in customer experience. Whether it’s improving our products and services, improving their digital experience, improving their buying experience; investments in customer experience are increasing. No one would ever argue that customer experience is unimportant or irrelevant to acquiring, retaining, and growing our customers. But there’s an aspect of customer experience that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention, […]
It Isn’t About You, It Really Is About Me!
I got an interesting prospecting note recently. It came, as so many do, disguised as a LinkedIn invitation. Honestly, I do try to look at these things to see if there is some value, something I can learn from the invitation, or from the individual if we connect. With this one, perhaps the biggest learning is how not to do things. Anthony is right, no one needs another random LinkedIn connection. But apparently, Anthony is trying to do so. As I read the invitation, rather than making the connection about me (a possible prospect), or even our potential shared interests, […]
Changing The Questions
We know questions are critical to our success as sales people. Sadly, we ask too few, choosing instead to pitch our products and solutions, hoping the customer has some interest in considering them, though we often don’t know why. Most modern selling programs talk about the importance of questions, but too often they focus on the wrong questions: Do you have funding for this project? Who’s involved in the decision making process? How will it be made? What alternatives are you considering? When will you make a decision? What are your needs and requirements? We can go on endlessly, whether […]
Start With The End In Mind, The Tyranny Of More, Part 2
I wrote, “Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, The Tyranny Of More.” In that, I suggested we might actually be more effective if we started thinking about how we accomplish our goals by doing less. The basic premise is that to do less and still achieve our goals, we have to do much better. We have to increase our win rates, increase our average deal size, compress our sales cycles, improve our prospecting, improve how we engage our customers, create great value in every interaction. I’d like to extend that discussion. While I think focusing on “getting better,” has a […]